NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - It is impossible to watch a Major League Baseball (MLB) game nowadays - such as those in the World Series now underway - without hearing about how many pitches a player has thrown.
But a new study suggests that when it comes to preventing injuries, the obsession of many teams with those kinds of numbers may be misplaced.
"I don't necessarily think that pitch counts or innings pitched are the best way to measure the demands of pitching," Thomas Karakolis, the lead author on the study, told Reuters Health.
Karakolis, a PhD candidate at the University of Waterloo in Canada, and two colleagues looked at data from every MLB pitcher from 2002 to 2007, focusing on a given year's pitch count, innings pitched and whether the player ended up injured the following year.
In that second year, more than a quarter of major league pitchers spent time on the disabled list. That rate jumped to nearly two in five pitchers for those who tended to throw six or seven innings.
But that difference - which would seem to support the idea of using pitch counts and innings pitched to pull pitchers - was more than likely due to chance, Karakolis said.
The injuries were significant enough that disabled list players were out for an average of 78 days - more than a third of the annual baseball season.
27/10/2012 : Ivan Oransky / Yahoo News.
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